"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Post #900, or what am I still doing here?

You may not believe it; I know I didn’t; but this is my 900th post here at The Passing
Parade.I hadn’t planned to do the
blogging thing for so long, but I guess I have, and it seems to me that the
occasion calls for me to do something special. The problem here, as I see it
and maybe you do too, is that I have nothing special to say now.Not having anything to say is a problem for
me, as I am not a politician. Politicians can rattle on for hours without
saying anything in particular or even knowing what they are talking about—the career
of Mr. Biden serves as a shining exemplar of this great truth—but for me to
write about something I actually have to have something to say about it.

Okay, I was going to go on about how I had nothing to write
about, but as I write this at 1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time here in the
egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread there is an elderly
non-Turkish speaking Puerto Rican gentleman singing Silent Night in Spanish
while dancing what appears to be his version of the Dance of the Sugar Plum
Fairy from Chaikovski’s The Nutcracker right in front of me.We must have a policy against this sort of
thing, but I’ve gone through the staff manual more times than I can remember
these past few days and I have not noticed any prohibitions against this
particular bit of weirdness. Actually,
the staff manual could use a good updating; there are no prohibitions, for
example, against copulating in the stairwells, giving birth in the ladies’
room, or dying in the men’s room, all of which have occurred in the years I’ve
been here. I am not sure when we became Apeneck Sweeney’s favorite hangout, but
I am sure this is not the sort of thing we ought to be encouraging hereabouts. It
frightens the taxpayers and makes them wonder what other sort of nonsense we
are wasting their money on.This still,
however, leaves the problem I have right now, although it appears that I won’t
have this problem for much longer. Our Nureyev manqué is running out of steam; there
seems to be only so much en pointe
work a deranged Latino man in his sixties or seventies can do in untied ratty
sneakers before gravity and a cannabis induced lack of coordination start to kick
in; and I think the time has come to invite him to take his artistry outside,
where the cops can tell him to knock it off before he starts scaring the various
and sundry passersby, their kids, and the family dog.

It is now later and the interruption is gone. He did not
want to go; balletomanes are a contentious lot, especially when they are stoned
out of their gourds and ballet is not the only thing they are mane about; but his
performance had degenerated from the beauties of classical ballet into
something approximating a synthesis of modern dance and Friday night wrestling,
and we will not put up with that sort of thing here. He also began to sing O
Holy Night at the top of his lungs, which are not in tune and are not likely to
be anytime in the near future, which contributed greatly to my decision to ask
him to leave.At this point, I really don’t
feel like continuing to write this or anything else; I have a headache. Frankly, at this point, I am not certain who
is stranger: our geriatric premier danseur noble, who is certifiably nuts, or
me, for continuing to work in this environment.There must be something in the water, or maybe I just lack
imagination.